Link building is an essential element of search engine optimisation. To put it mildly, ranking high in Google search results without links to your website – preferably from the most popular sites – is quite difficult. We’ve already shared some useful link-building tips in a quick read, but now we’re launching a series of articles to dive deeper into the tricks of the trade. Here’s the first part!
Why Is Link Building Important?
A website gains authority in the “eyes” of Google’s algorithms when it receives links pointing to it. There are two main ways to achieve this: by producing content that others consider worth mentioning – and linking to – and by encouraging other website editors to link to you, both directly and indirectly. Of course, it’s more complex than that, which we’ll explore in this series of articles.
Google views a link from another site as a vote of confidence that your site is worth mentioning on a particular topic – from both a search engine and user perspective. The more such ‘votes’ we receive, and from a greater variety of sites, the better we rank in the search results. This is not enough to get you on the first page of Google search, but it is an essential step along the way.
Link Building Techniques
There are four main methods of link building:
- Linking internally;
- Requesting links from other sites;
- Buying links;
- Earning external links.
Let’s take a closer look at these methods!
Linking Internally
This involves creating links to your website on other sites yourself. Of course, this doesn’t mean stealing login details—there are more sophisticated and entirely legal methods than hacking.
For example, you can create links on:
- Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest);
- Comment sections;
- Online forums;
- Facebook groups;
- LinkedIn groups.
Of course, these methods need to be handled with care, as they can be considered spam by Google – especially when a suspiciously large number of links are placed in comments and groups. When it comes to comments, avoid linking aimlessly! Only include a link under posts related to your website’s topic, accompanied by relevant, value-added text that fits naturally into the conversation.
Even before starting link building – or even before launching the website – it is strongly recommended to check whether the domain name is available on social networking sites. For example, if you type your domain name after facebook.com/ and instagram.com/ and find it is already occupied by a profile, you might need to reconsider your choice of name. If you can secure the name on all the popular social networking sites – and even show activity on the profile that owns the name – these links will immediately be seen by Google as valuable.
Since these are the simplest linking methods, Google does not reward them as highly as, for example, links embedded within unique content on a popular site, but they are still worth using.
For more useful tips, read parts two, three and four of our article series!